Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @03:49AM
from the invest-in-canoes dept.

New submitter zenyu writes "IPCC's 2mm per year estimate for sea level rise at current CO2 levels has proven too optimistic. Sea levels have been rising 3.2mm per year in the last two decades. The IPCC's 50 cm — 100 cm projection for the next century may prove equally optimistic."

This is their entire purpose in life - to force you to pay to do anything by using their energy resources. And, they're going to do everything they can to make sure any bad news about energy consumption goes away.

Remember kids, this is why you fight the energy companies. Do everything you can to fight them back!

Energy or oil? If to defeat the much less powerfull tobaco industry misinformation war took 50 years. Oil companies have much more money and resources.We must demand that the oil companies collect the garbage generated by the product they sell just as happens with batteries and tires.

I've grown extraordinarily pessimistic that anything can or will be done about climate change at this point, and my only thought at this point is that we just need to enjoy what we can until the inevitable self-inflicted pain and suffering we will endure from its affects.

I've grown extraordinarily pessimistic that anything can or will be done about climate change at this point, and my only thought at this point is that we just need to enjoy what we can until the inevitable self-inflicted pain and suffering we will endure from its affects.

I've grown extraordinarily pessimistic that anything can or will be done about climate change at this point, and my only thought at this point is that we just need to enjoy what we can until the inevitable self-inflicted pain and suffering we will endure from its affects.

We don't know how to solve such problems. The extent we can do with our current political technology is to become increasingly centralized to implement and enforce consistent policies. Which is a much bigger nightmare than global warming and would cause more suffering in the long run. Of course we won't call it suffering then, since we will be educated to know better.

I'm pessimistic about our ability to solve this problem, but I'm mildly optimistic about the coping part. We can easily adapt. New technologies will deal with the problems we're likely to face. The worst part would still be the politics of it. There is too much friction in resource allocation, which will make it very hard to help threatened populations. There is even more political friction if you want to relocate them.

Would these issues result in the same kind of centralization? If so, then moving in that direction now would be the lesser evil. It's very hard to reason about.

> I'm pessimistic about our ability to solve this problem, but I'm mildly optimistic about the coping part. We can easily adapt. New technologies will deal with the problems we're likely to face. The worst part would still be the politics of it. There is too much friction in resource allocation, which will make it very hard to help threatened populations. There is even more political friction if you want to relocate them.

>Biological systems can't be so fragile as all that, or we wouldn't be here.

Wrong. 97% of all species that ever existed are extinct. The history of the earth is filled with massive extinction events wiping out damn near everything alive.Life is resilient, even if just a few bacteria survive, in a few million years there'll be a system with plants and animals again.But biological systems are incredibly fragile and quite regularly get wiped out.You probably KNOW about the dinosaurs, but that wasn't a rare event, the history of earth is littered with hundreds of extinction events - most of them WORSE than that one.

Life starts over with the left-overs.

Now see, that's good news in a sense - no matter how badly we fuck up - chances are we can't wipe out life on earth, earth will live on and in a few million years there'll be some other creature who asks "Why are we here ?" - but it's BAD news for us !Sufficient disturbance to the ballance and it collapses, and we go down with it (hint: the larger the creature the smaller it's chances of surviving an extinction event - we count as a large creature, small in this context means bacteria and single-celled sea-creatures).

Now see, that's good news in a sense - no matter how badly we fuck up - chances are we can't wipe out life on earth, earth will live on and in a few million years there'll be some other creature who asks "Why are we here ?" -

Even this is completely correct. Humans have collected and created materials and diseases far in excess in terms of both quantity and concentration of what nature would have ever produced.

If we go, we're leaving these behind for future creatures to have to contend with. The stockpiles we have of nuclear material and rare and very lethal diseases will be waiting in the wings for whatever end product a few millions years of evolution's best efforts can produce.

One day, that sealed , 3 foot thick steel and concrete door on that CDC black site finally gives way and looses on the earth things which no creature evolved to deal with. Ditto our nuclear stockpiles. It's far and away enough to kill everything, every time for eons going forward.

It' s something like the original book the Planet Of The Apes actually, where even if creatures evolve to a fairly sophisticated level, they aren't going to understand what it is and what it can do to them should they open it, topple it, live near it or just be unfortunate enough to cohabitate on a planet with it.

Like it or not, we are now and forever after the caretakers of this earth and all the life that is or will be on it.

"Extinction event" is somewhat vague, since it all depends on what threshold you apply, and how you set the time boundaries. If you define one, say, as extinction of over 10% of species, then you could easily get a hundred [wikipedia.org].

I'm not black-and-white about central planning. I just don't think monopolies are ever a good idea. A world united under a single state is the ultimate monopoly. There is no point in arguing about the freedom after the singularity.

I also haven't said anything about AGW being wrong. Though, reading all responses to my comment, it's no wonder that there is so much resistance to the AGW rhetoric.

Don't get me wrong, even though I'm not convinced that the civilization will collap

"but where do you put 16 million people?" - Just move them all to Israel since that seemed to work so well before for a group of people which claimed they had no nation.

And I think you misunderstand what the deniers are denying. They are not denying that climate change is occurring. They are denying that the climate change is human-caused. They deny that there's anything we can do about climate change to stop it. But they're not denying the climate change themselves. Therefore when these mis-informed

'In the 1970s scientists were predicting an ice age, now it's global warming.'

There's plenty of deniers who claim warming isn't happening, who claim its a conspiracy to raise taxes, who cite a Time magazine article from the early 1970s (when global warming actually still was more or less a consensus) as evidence of some discrepancy in the sciences, because apparently 40 years of scientific advances can be refuted by misquoting what scientists 'believed' in the past.

Deniers won't be able to find 'safe places' to camp out, it's not like one can just find a bunker and ride it out for a couple of years. Even if some now accept that warming is taking place, the science is still being denied. The net effect, doing nothing, is the same. The difference amounts to splitting hairs.

Although it's true there are parts of the world that won't be hit as hard as others, and those of us who live there won't have to worry about camping out.

Although it's true there are parts of the world that won't be hit as hard as others, and those of us who live there won't have to worry about camping out.

No, but we'd have to dig in and stock up like survivalists. We probably couldn't keep a few hundred million displaced people out anyway. Right now a trickle of Africans are trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. When Europe south of the Alps becomes uninhabitable, the North will be overrun. As will Canada and Siberia.

Not many, as long as they move when waterline has moved to their front door.

The problem is not people drowning. The problem is that 70% of earth's human population lives near coast lines. Which means you would have to relocate entire cities & countries... try doing that in time.

The entire human exodus from Africa was during the last glacial period. And it almost did wipe us out. At some point about 70 000 years ago (in the middle of the last glaciation period) the total human population shrunk to 2 000 individuals - that's one flu outbreak from extinction.

The changes we are facing now are of a much more dramatic than the gradual cooling over millennia during the last glaciation (4-5 degrees cooling over millennia vs 4-10 degrees increase in less than a century). Absolutely best case if we don't do anything now is +4C in less than 100 years, that's a civilization ending change. Worst case places +4C in 30 years, and +10C within 100 years - that's an extinction level event. - And that's without the possible feedback loops from ocean CO2 release and methane release from the tundras.

Really? Did you see what happened when PARTS of New York City's gasoline and electric distribution were interrupted for 10 days or so at the start of the month? With well-fed volunteers and plenty of electricity and gasoline right nearby?

Your snarky reply implies that we cannot continue without fossil fuels. If that's true, then we're just as screwed once they run out. So, we can either transition to clean energy sooner, or later, or never - pick one.

Before you give up, I think it's worthwhile to examine the kernel of truth in the denialist position.

When you force a denialist into the corner he'll pull out this chestnut: the history of climate shows greater differences than we're talking about for the next century; there's no "right" temperature for the globe. There's more than a kernel of truth in this, it just misses the fact that there's a big difference between changes that happen over the course of many lifetimes or many lifetimes in the future, and change that happens in the lifetime of people currently inhabiting the planet. It's a bit like somebody saying "fire is part of the natural forest lifecycle" then throwing his lit cigarette butt onto the dry forest floor.

The differences between conservatives and liberals on this issue is that conservatives fear change we'd have to do something about, and liberals fear change we can't do anything about. But I content there are no such changes we cannot do anything about.

Humans are adaptable. Change is traumatic, but we can adapt to a "new normal". On one of my favorite forest walks I encounter a visible sign of climate change: a dying grove of eastern hemolock (Tsuga canadensis). Twenty years ago walking into the grove in summer was like walking into a refrigerator. You could not see a patch of sky through the canopy, and sometimes snow drifts survived til June under the eaves of the grove. What's killing the grove is the wooly adgelid, an Asian insect whose northward range is limited by cold winters. When that grove finally dies I will miss it, but future generations won't. They'll see the black birch and rhododendron that replace it as normal, the way I see the red oak and Norway maple that replaced the American Chestnut (once the dominant hardwood species in N. America) as normal. Something will be lost but everyone won't experience loss, just those of us who remember what we used to have. *We* will experience loss, as will our children and grandchildren; but our great-great-great grandchildren won't.

So what can we do about climate change? First, it's far from clear we can't stop it; we've been so busy debating (at least in political circles) whether climate is changing at all that we haven't really put any serious thought into stopping it. It's far too early to give up hope.

It's also quite feasible that change can be slowed. People tend to underestimate the utility of that. There's a big difference between a 100cm sea level rise in 100 years and 100cm rise in 200 years; it's much easier and less traumatic to adapt to gradual change than sudden change.

And we can face squarely the changes that are coming rather than pretending they won't or wringing our hands. That includes preparing for the loss of coastal property and accommodating populations as they abandon of some currently habitable areas. It includes preparing for the emergence of new diseases as the geographic range of pathogens and disease vectors expands. There's preserving species in danger of extinction as their habitat shifts out from under them, and changing crops as rainfall patterns change. Those are huge but achievable tasks that are made much easier by a marginal reduction in the rate of change.

Honestly, my concern is less about the changes that climate will wreak, or even the ways we'll have to adapt to them, but about the ways that persistent denialism prefigures an inability to make decisions wisely. And also about the way those patterns of thought are hampering our ability to make wise choices now.

If denialism were just about the fragments of truth you're talking about, we'd be able to hold a rational debate about them. But those fragments are buried under a mountain of outright lies, delusion

You don't think that maybe you're just using ancillary data to paint an inaccurate picture? There's far more dialogue now than there was 30 years ago about the topic, and the loudest and most persistent ARE the crazies (on both sides).

There was plenty of dialog in the 80s, if you knew were to look. My wife is an oceanographer and I followed the debate in the scientific journals she reads and in the science press (Science News). If you look through collections of scientific abstracts you'll see the origins of debate go all the way back to the 1950s when the consensus was that the globe was heading for a cooling period. As data to the contrary emerged, the volume of dialogue increased until the 80s and 90s, when climate change and anthr

Assuming children are exactly like their parents. After all no child whose parents are on welfare has ever got a job when they grew up, right? And no child whose parents had a job has ever gone on welfare, right?

We probably can't adapt, at record population levels, to a sudden reduction in the amount of food available during the gap between large amounts of currently arable land becoming unfarmable, and potentially farmable lands becoming arable. Just saying.

This is a fairly major problem and it doesn't get solved by pretending that once the crisis hits in ernest we'll somehow be able to dig our way out of it, any more than "Waiting until 1st January 2000 and fixing anything that goes wrong" would have been a sa

Every estimate has been overly optimistic. Can anyone see a problem with this? Essentially throw out the best case scenario and look at the worst case scenario as the baseline. Anyone not panicked at the thought of this IS A FOOL! After a decade plus of denial we come out with the worst case scenario is our best case. Basically three foot of ocean level rise is the best we can hope for and the likely result is twice that. Kiss all that coastal property goodbye! Forget all that because it mostly affects rich people. Just look at the Great Lakes. They stand at record levels. Remember this ISN'T the bad this is the best we can expect for the next 100 years and it may get worse after that. Drought is likely to be the norm not to mention storms damage. In 10 or 20 years the conservatives will blame the liberals for not telling them how bad it could get. Okay from a liberal here's how bad it can get, ever see Road Warrior???? That's bad. Good is probably Soylent Green. Any questions????

"The rich" might loose their valuable beachfront property, but many poor in Bangladesh and other places will drown.

A small sadistic part of me is looking forward to see what our right-wing politicians who argue that (a) climate change is a conspiracy and (b) immigrants are evil once the people-flood sets in - hundreds of millions of people are not going to sit quietly on their hands and drown, no matter how much right-wing western politicians wish that is true... Lets just hope there are no mayor shortages before the worlds food production can adjust - but on the other hand, "someone else" will probably get the pointy end of that problem, too...

Yes unfortunately this is being treated as a scientific observation where caution means not making the most extreme claims. It should be treated like an engineering problem where caution means assuming the most extreme claims might be true (and build in a factor of 2 safety).

What's the mechanism? How does one go from modest sea level rises over long periods of time to extinction? No one has presented any threat related to AGW that is significant enough to cause human extinction. Instead it's all idle hysteria.

Do you mean record lows or highs? Because the way it's written seems to indicate you think they're at record highs, and that is not the case at all. I am originally from Wisconsin, and dropping lake levels has been a concern for a long time and this year saw a record low for Lake Michigan. The states surrounding the lakes have been actively trying to protect and increase the lake levels, since they had been dropping for so long. Many states (read: the southwest) wanted to run a pipeline from the Great Lakes in order that Arizona can have green grass in their front yards. All of the Great Lake states (and eventually the feds) signed the Great Lakes Compact [wikipedia.org] in order to protect the lakes. In effect, it requires that all water removed from the lakes must be returned.

Dropping lake levels has a significant economic impact on shipping in the midwest - measured in the billions of dollars (too lazy to find a citation for this, but I've read more than a few reports on this over the years).

As for the rest of your post, yes sea level are rising, but I think a 3 foot rise in sea levels in the short term is not terribly likely. The seas are rising, this is a problem, but I don't think it serves anyone to overstate the problem. A cm or two is a big enough problem as it is. 3 ft in the short term would be nothing short of catastrophic. Calm down, focus on the problem, readjust to the new data, and contribute to the conversation productively with your newfound context.

I'm definetely not an expert on this, but I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Cities were using too much water for utilities and no returning it, then there are some climate concerns, but I think the biggie (both from an actual cause, and political view) is the St. Clair River [jsonline.com].

On the other hand, plants aren't so keen on heat stress. There's multiple effects going on, some of which are positive and some negative and many of which are non-linear, and that's why this stuff is so hard to work out: balancing the relative sizes of all these things to get the overall picture (especially in non-equilibrium situations) is viciously difficult.

Plants cannot live on CO2 alone. They also need nitrogen-rich soil, water and sunlight. In the wild, these are the scarce resources for which plants compete, not CO2. Their root systems strangle each other to get at the nutrients and water in the soil, and they grow tall to soak up sunlight. I haven't ever seen plants try to suffocate each other because there isn't enough CO2 to go around.

I take it you never took high school biology, because that was damn sure an experiment we did in mine. Plant seeds at different distances from each other, and observe the impact on their growth.

Spoiler: the result is if they're too close, they likely both die before maturity. Protein is king with respect to plants. Can't even make chlorophyll for new cells(much less complex structures like chloroplasts) without sufficient amino acids(specifically glycine). Plants can only get that from nitrogen-fixing

We have so/so carbon or temperature models. Our climate models suck. And our adaption models are total guess work. More or less we don't have anywhere near enough measurable facts.

Well, the carbon and temperature models are very well established and vetted, and are in accordance with basic physics and chemistry.

The earth's only (not completely insignificant) heat transfer method is radiation. There's no conduction or convection in space. The sun produces lots of high-ish energy EM radiation (UV, visible light, near infrared). The atmosphere of the earth is transparent to most of this (O2 and O3 thankfully absorb and reemit the higher energy and therefore more dangerous UV radiatio

One of the most regretful moments of my life was when a few people from an organization I don't remember were visiting my school, claiming that rising sea levels are nothing more than myths and scare stories. I clearly remember the guy in front of the class being all smug, saying "I'm sure you've all seen the movie Water World. Well, that's just Hollywood because the sea is never going to rise. Ice floats on water and has actually a lower density than water, therefore, if it melts, the sea level is going to stay the same or actually -lower-....".

I was in agony, on the one hand I wanted to shove Antarctica, an entire continent packed with ice, full in his face, but my shyness, fear of being at the center of attention and making a scene by completely discrediting these highborn scientific authorities that had come to talk to us, made me stay quiet.

I assure you that if you spoke up, you would have been belittled by the smug asshole, your teacher would have joined in or told you to shut up, you would have been sent to the office, your parents called, and suspended. You then would probably would have been forced to apologize to those kooks.

No you did the right thing. And not only that, I can be pretty sure those smug asshats walked away thinking they did a great job getting the "word" out about the "truth". Those people are delusional. All the data in the World will never change their mind. And as more things are done (hopefully) to deal with Global Warming, those people will be scratching their heads wondering why there's so much support for such actions. Kind of like the Fox News crowd who couldn't believe that Obama kicked Romney's ass in the elections. Actually it is the same crowd.

The Fox News - Talk Radio crowd are so ill informed that they are living in a delusion of what reality is. Why right now, they firmly believe that Obama is going to pull some sort of a legal thingy doodle and be in office until 2020. But that's another story and post....

20 years should be a big enough time frame to see something, but it's still hard to make out what that graph is saying. The first 12 years look like acceleration, then there seems to be a fall-off in the rise for 6 years, but the dip in 2011 might just be an anomaly.

The IPCC always said that various positive feedbacks were not included because the science wasn't clear enough. That always implied that the AR projections were the best possible case, and don't forget that those were the consensus opinion - meaning that if the Saudi delegates didn't agree it wouldn't go in the AR.

I just hope the AR5 will be a little more realistic and a wake-up call.

"Unless we reduce our carbon pollution rapidly, this study clearly shows we are heading for the nightmare world at the top end of the IPCC predictions,"

No, we'll simply be heading for a world with sea levels that are a few feet higher and temperatures that are a few degrees higher a century from now, ample time to adapt without much effort. It's not like we need to move New York or Miami overnight.

Yeah, it's not like New York City recently experienced severe flooding or something causing at least $60 billion worth of damage, killing a few people, and basically shutting the whole place down for days.

You seem to be confusing storm surge and a big*ss rain cloud with sea Levels rising. A few mm of sea rise didn't flood Manhattan.
Your underlying point may well be valid, but your supporting argument of it doesn't float.

You have got to admire the objectivity of Slashdot readers. I posted an article with a reference to the NOAA site that has global sea-level data online, for all to see. This data contradicts TFA (which is primarily a political report). Slashdot did not disappoint - within a couple of minutes, my comment was moderated into nonexistence..

Here's a second chance: go look at the actual, raw data. [noaa.gov] Lots of stations have data for nearly a century. None of them show the kind of recent change in trend that the article claims.

Other than Alaska's armpit (to coin a phrase), pretty much all going up, mostly in the 0-3mm/year range, but a hell of a lot of yellow and quite a bit of red. What exactly makes you claim it in some way debunks TFA? It appears to support it at first glance.

The US of A is merely a land mass from which human people do the things they do. Under similar circumstance and opportunity other humans will do similarly. This is a fact of human nature. It has nothing to do with nationality. Let's be clear on this point.

That the rich and powerful of the US are abusing the rest of the world, I will not deny. The older I get, the more I awaken to it. But this is not really US Americans so much as it is a select group of people within the US. They seem to live in another plane of existence where the law and everything else treats them differently, protected in a cloak of money. They can harm the global economy without trouble to themselves, but a person can shop lift and get prison. I think the notion is clear enough.

It all happens because of greed you know. China wants more so they sell out their own people and pollute without shame. The US industries have done the same though within a tighter framework of law for centuries. (http://www.wvminesafety.org/disaster.htm) The link just points out one state and one type of industry, but you can pretty much guarantee this is not isolated. It is important to note that the people making decisions and money are completely isolated from problems which may result from their decisions in most cases. For example, several people in the BP incident were charged and convicted of crimes, but not the real decision makers... not the ones at the top.

But greed... greed... a human condition, not one which is exclusive to residents of a particular land mass. These are crimes of opportunity, not of character.

I hate to point this out but it is essentially and in practice quite true: Civilization is most advanced when we counter our own nature with a system of law and keep it enforced fairly and without exception. In order to be fair, law must be in the interests of the masses, not in the interests of the few. So religious law and law which supports the interests of a few need to go.

If anyone thinks "the US" is the problem, they need to look at where the people of the US came from and what those people, when allowed, have done to their world in the past and what they are doing at present. There are a lot of pots calling kettles black.

We should accept what we are and what we know of our nature. We should acknowledge we already have an effective solution to our weaknesses which we call a framework of constitutional law... and support it. When people protest government, people should demand that law and order prevail. Many people are. But we should focus on the causes here and this is, as I see it, the real cause when you exclude "human nature."

Yes, because the U.S. is so evil and corrupt--as opposed to all of Africa, South America, Asia, most of the Middle East, etc. And despite never having had an empire to speak of--like Britain, France, Mongolia, Italy, Iran, etc.--the U.S. is clearly responsible for all the problems in the world. And when it comes to invading other countries, well, clearly no one compares to the U.S.--certainly an enlightened country like Britain would never consider something as brutish as invading 90% of the countries in the world [telegraph.co.uk]. Only the evil, uncouth U.S. does that!

Yes, the U.S. is the cause of all your problems. You bear absolutely no responsibility for any of your own goddamned messes. It's all those evil Americans' fault.

Just like the US genocide towards the native Americans, or the imposition of slavery across half a continent. No man is responsible for the sins of his father, so what we're talking about is what *this* generation has done. In that regard, the US is adjudged to be sorely lacking.

Well, we didn't follow you into the collective clusterfuck that was Iraq... and we've been enjoying universal health care and other communist evils for some time now, so would you like to elaborate how exactly we are doing the US's bidding?

You need to read into the numbers to find out why you are wrong. There are two main problems with USA life expectancy numbers:
1) The US starts the clock one a breath is made by the child. Other European countries use weight, length, and some other factors to determine when life starts. With the US saving so many premature and all of them counting when they die from being so premature it lowers the US numbers. Also death counting is different, US counts all people who die on its soil for other countries they don't count non-citizens.
2) To many foreigner who were born in poorer countries. The countries you have listed and other with higher life expectancy have one thing in common fewer percentage of people who were born outside of that country or were born in poor countries.
Look at charts to see life expectancy from ages 5,25,50,75 and that listing changes.

" The US starts the clock one a breath is made by the child. Other European countries use weight, length, and some other factors to determine when life starts. "
Bullshit. In reality average lifespan in the *US* is calculated WITHOUT taking child mortality into account.

This shows that an average 25 year old in Germany has a longer life expectancy than his counterpart in the U.S. by about 1.2 years.Interestingly, an 80 year old in the U.S. has a longer life expectancy than Germany.

In all fairness, I am not sure that this spells any significant difference in health care as the U.S. has a much higher mortality rate from car accidents than any European country. Regardless, the original discussion was about other countries having poor health care compared to the US, but these numbers show otherwise.

No, he is suggesting that some births that would count as life birth and then subsequent death days or hours later wouldn't count as a live birth in European countries. He is quite right about this. What is uncertain is if the life expectancy tables account for this. A link I provided show that adults in European countries generally have a longer lifespan than those in the US, so I think his point is moot.

The only thing universal healthcare brought you was waiting lines and mediocre care if you're in any country but norway/sweden/denmark and maybe the UK

The typical ignorant American answer of really not knowing anything about the world outside. In this European country (Belgium) we don't have long waiting lines or mediocre care. That is not based on some flag waving argument but multiple studies that come out every year. This is the case for most European countries BTW.

It is funny as Americans tend always to point as greece as THE example of the "socialist" plan going bad. The situation in Greece has nothing to do with healthcare or socialism but with clientelism, fraud, tax evasion (which for American companies is a sport), etc.

Name any "socialist" country with universal health care that has had a fungal meningitis outbreak.

Consider whether the fungal meningitis outbreak had anything to do with the profit motive of corporations who considered making a quick buck more important than ensuring sterile conditions for their drugs.

The only thing universal healthcare brought you was waiting lines and mediocre care if you're in any country but norway/sweden/denmark and maybe the UK. You give up so much control over your existences for this and other handouts and I do not understand why. Do you really want to end up like greece?..or hell, the USA 20-40 years from now, as it slides into its new status as a chinese satellite?

First, we do not have waiting lines in hospitals or any other part of the healthcare system in Germany. Especially not for urgent things. Second, when I have a chronic disease, my bill does not rise. I do not go bankrupt over healthcare cost. Third, according to OECD measures. The average US citizen pays $ 6000 for healthcare per year (including state money and including those people who do not have any healthcare) with a service coverage of around 80%, while the so puny Europeans only pay around $ 3000 per year (also including all subsidies) and have a service coverage by 99%. Fourth, the problem in Greece is corruption. And the ever mounting debt is a general problem of our world economy. the US has a much bigger deficit per person and by GDP. Especially when compared to Germany. And that after Germany had to incorporate East Germany in the 1990s.

However, we are all sitting in the same boat (including China). If we sink, the sink too. And we have all a resource and sustainability problem. And one cause of that is the present constitution of the economic system. That has to be fixed. As well as the resource problem. And yes. The US is not helping with these issues according to past outcomes of global environment conferences. The "We need to drill for more oil"-logic is also flawed. It would be better to start switching then to prolong the present. But, if you do not want to change, Europe or to be more precise the EU can try to do better. You are always welcomed to follow us.

First, we do not have waiting lines in hospitals or any other part of the healthcare system in Germany. Especially not for urgent things.

That's funny, because here in the USA, I've gotten pretty used to having to wait for several hours in hospital "emergency" rooms. I've also regularly had my insurance company deny treatments or medicines prescribed by my doctor. Once my doctor had to try three times before he found one my insurance company would let my pharmacy give me. And God Forbid somebody gets sick on vacation. That's "out of network". If you aren't careful, it would be far cheaper to buy a plane ticket home to go to a covered doctor.

the problem with too much military spending is a problem in the US. You waste much more money of your GDP for the military than other Western countries. However, this is not the main problem. The main problem is that the taxes do not suffice to pay for all the social benefits. So you either get rid of the social benefits or have to raise taxes.

In the last 30 years, all Western countries have reduced the taxes for rich people. As Warren Buffet pointed out, he is paying 17% taxes, while most people pay 30%. In Germany the situation is similar. Taxes on your salary go from 15% up to 42% for high incomes. However, profits made on the capital market is only taxed with 20%.

One problem with taxes on these kinds of income are, if you raise them too much, people move their money to Switzerland, Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands (there are ways in preventing that, but politicians look deliberately in the other direction).

The other option is to reduce social benefits or be consequent and do not have any. While this sounds like a simple solution, it results in a lot of other problems. A country, or a group of people live together. they are interdependent. If one group raises to much above the others, they tend to disconnect (happened in history several times). As the richer groups tend then to turn their back on the rest (not necessarily to everyone, but to the majority) and stop understanding their situation, they steer up resentments on the other end. When those lower class people, start to have problems sustaining their present level, which often means they have to move to cheaper and less habitable quarters. Such environment creates the general feeling that you cannot achieve anything. You can struggle, but in the end you fail. When living in that environment, the times get harder, people tend to violence. Rich people normally call then for the state to protect them. When that does not help, they build guarded homes and villages. Shutting out the poor. You can visit that situation in South Africa.

In such a situation, it can happen, and it has happened, that the poor start some sort of revolt. The main trigger for the revolt in Egypt and other states in northern Africa, and also in Syria, are the poor condition, and the disconnectedness of the ruling class.

It is absolutely clear that such a situation is even for the ruling class very uncomfortable and undesirable. Therefore, we have to sustain the option for everyone that we care for his or her basic needs. This cuts violence between people in lower classes and towards the middle class. Furthermore, we have to provide the means that people can evolve. They must be empowered. If so they can find their place in live. Not everyone needs to become rich or even strive for it. Happiness or other contexts of wellbeing can be achieved in different way. However, they correlate highly with guaranteed human rights, which include education, medical care, care of elderly, security, housing, a task or work with which you can identify, fair working conditions etc. (see http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml [un.org]).

The only working solution to the above problems is social security systems. Especially those who tend to empower people, like the one in Sweden. Not so much like the system in Germany. And definitely not like the US system.

On a side note: If you look at the total debt of the US government (and therefor the citizens) plus the debt of private households it adds up quite well with the amount of money the upper 10% of your country own. In Germany it is quite similar. Recently they released the latest poverty report for Germany. The government cheated a bit in the summary, but the data is telling another story. Their cutting of social benefits did not help. More people have jobs, but they cannot live from the money they get. So they get state money, which still costs the the state money, my tax money.

It is not possible to continually provide any service which has an ever increasing cost to everyone for "free" without eventually running out of money or having to limit that service. Because math.

The US costs $6000 per person for health care with 80% coverage.In the EU it costs around $3000 for 99% coverage.

You see: it doesn't matter where the money comes from, whether people pay direclty out of pocket or from what you mockingly call "entitlement programs".

The money has to come from somewhere in all cases.

In the USA case, people earn it, then pay it.

In the EU case, people earn it, the government takes what it needs and pays it.

But it's still coming from people who earn it.

And in the EU, LESS total money is needed, by a factor of 2.

So you can blather all you want about "entitlement programs" and ranting about social secutity, but the EU system with it's much bigger entitlement programs will run out of money for health care WAAAY after the US.

The Greeks ended up where they are because people got into government who should have gone into prison in the first place. (I still don't understand why they haven't reinstituted the death penalty for those people who have falsified Greek government accounting and caused the deaths of a few thousand people. That's mass murder to me.)

The problem for Portugal, Spain and Italy in particular is the way the euro is set up (note that the UK's problems aren't even 10% as severe as most of the eurozone's). During the boom years for example, the eurozone's interest rate policy was set to suit the German and French economies, but completely unsuitable for the periphery. Spain in particular was actually complying with EU rules over deficit size (while France and Germany flouted them) and was behaving much better than virtually the rest of Europe.

There are indeed waiting lines here in Norway, at least, not for emergency procedures, of course. But we're still trying to reach a goal of no more than 60 days of waiting for an operation. Reorganizing the public hospitals was supposed to help - it hasn't, so far. The press and TV are pushing, it looks like the bureaucrats may be losing - as they should. Also, lots of patients don't know that they can now freely choose which hospital to go to for operations and other procedures.

Right. They have no place going to an ER for a "runny nose". They go to ER because they can't go to a doctor because they have no insurance and its way too expensive. If there was universal healthcare, they'd not be going to ER, they'd go to their (no cost) doctor, get a (maximum price $7) prescription for what ails them, and go home. This leaves ER to be far more productive for genuine emergencies.

So in fact, the future with genuine universal healthcare is the exact opposite of what you suggest - free doct

This comment is sort of like an Italian criticizing Nazi Germany in 1939. Perhaps you have forgotten that your country and indeed pretty much the entire WORLD has been all too eager to assist the US government in perpetrating its crimes against humanity?

Maybe it isn't the individual people that are the problem, but rather the politicians? Just maybe?

An American advocating action in America is entirely sensible. Englishmen should advocate action in England. Chinese peple should advocate action in China. Our leaders should talk to each other on our behalves to ensure that everyone does the right thing, but it has to start with electing leaders who are willing to do what we think needs doing.

No actual scientist in the field ever predicted that Florida would be underwater by 2012. And no, Al Gore did not make that prediction either. You need to pay more attention to the time frames that people put on their projections.